Atheism and Theism JJ Haldane - Common Sense Atheism

Further Reflections on Theism 241
the hypothesis that there is a God, I take it to refute the assumption that
God is complex. Some hold that the very idea of God offers no sense. This
might be understood in three ways: first, that no content can be attached to
the term ‘God’; second, that such purported content as is claimed for it is in
fact nonsensical; and third, that while the content given it is not incoherent
in this last respect, it nevertheless contains one or more inconsistencies.
The worries about the idea of God, voiced by Smart and shared by some
reviewers, are, I think, a combination of the first and the third of these.
They find no suitable content in the claim that God’s existence is necessary;
and think that the suggestion that God is simple is incompatible with the
idea that he is the designer of the complex cosmos.
I held that the argument from contingency leads us to ‘the existence of
something which exists eternally, which does not owe its being to anything
else and which cannot not exist’ (p. 135). It was observed, correctly, that the
last clause deploys a notion of modal existence and hence fails to be informative
to anyone already puzzled by the idea of existential necessity. Smart’s own
position is not that the very notion of ‘necessity’ is hopelessly obscure but that
the various ways in which it might be clarified are unhelpful to the theist.
Considering logical, natural and mathematical necessity, the first is dismissed
on the grounds that were ‘God exists’ logically necessary, then its negation
would be logically contradictory and hence the ontological argument would
be sound. Since I agree that Anselm’s argument fails, I accept that the claim
that ‘God exists’ is not logically necessary in the formal sense envisaged by
Smart and endorsed by others. Physical necessity as required by natural laws
and cosmological boundary conditions will not do either, since ex hypothesi
God is the transcendent cause of nature. So far as concerns mathematical
necessity Smart considers that traditional mathematical Platonism with its
ontology of numbers and other abstract entities ‘which exist eternally and in
some sense necessarily’ (p. 42) may offer the best hope for the theist’s idea of
necessary existence. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, contemporary mathematical
Platonists have little to say about the necessary existence of numbers, and
Smart is to be appreciated for engaging the issue. 21 He has, nonetheless, two
objections to such a theory. Firstly, it is unclear how the material mind could
be acquainted with abstract entities; secondly, other than in the strict logical
case already allowed for, modality is a matter of derivability from an agreed
set of background assumptions. These points are evidently question-begging.
The first concerns epistemology not ontology and presumes a view of mind
that many (theists and non-theists alike) would reject; the second just reasserts
a contextualist metalinguistic account. All the same, Smart and others are
right to press the issue of how I conceive the necessary being of God in
order that (a) it makes sense, and (b) it is not such that the existence of the
world itself could be necessary in just the same sense.